'Vain Art of the Fugue' is an exhausting, post-Kafka tale of something and nothing, in seemingly infinite variation. It begins with a man racing to catch the bus that should hopefully get him to the train station in time to meet somebody. We don't know who this person is - sometimes he's a young boy, sometimes an older man; sometimes he's meeting a girl, or a retired soldier; sometimes he's seeing somebody off, a girlfriend who has left him.

Every other element in the story also shifts and twists with each retelling. First-person narration slips into third; now we're in the present, then suddenly in the past, and sometimes in the future. Very quickly one realises that one has to give up any hope of following the threads; allow the threads to pull you into Tsepeneag's tapestry and you'll be a lot happier. ( )